SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Mirror of Memory: soloists, ensemble, Spectrum Dance Theater, Northwest Boychoir, Illsley Ball Nordstrom Recital Hall, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 11.5.2009 (BJ)

Golijov: Tenebrae
Geist: Cosmic Spring
Schreker: The Wind
Olivero: Shtiler, Shtiler; Mode’Ani’
Harlap:  Pictures from the Private Collection of God

Music of Remembrance, the splendid organization Mina Miller founded with the goal of  “ensuring that the voices of musical witness be heard,” concluded its eleventh enterprising season with this concert, putting the usual moral pressure on the reviewer. Saying anything negative about works that came out of, or invoke the memory of, so much human suffering inevitably makes one feel a bit of a heel. I’m happy to say, however, that quite apart from the customary high performance standards, there was enough good music on offer in this program to make the evening a considerable success.

Introduced from the platform by the passionately articulate Ms. Miller, the concert was titled “Mirror of Memory.” That was a just choice of words because, along with two works by composers active during the Nazi period, the larger part of the program consisted of music that looks back on that time from the perspective of the last two decades: works by Osvaldo Golijov, Betty Olivero, and Aharon Harlap.

The best of those works was, I thought, Golijov’s Tenebrae, written in 2002. Picking up some melismatic shapes from Couperin’s Troisième Leçon de Tènèbres, the Argentine-born composer has fashioned a contemplative piece – music of consolation rather than complaint – that superimposes hauntingly caressing vocal phrases on a richly textured accompaniment. Frequently seeming to coalesce with Laura DeLuca’s mellow clarinet tone, soprano Emily Hindrichs fully conveyed the music’s eloquence, with violinists Mikhail Schmidt and Leonid Keylin, violist Arie Schachter, and cellist Mara Finkelstein completing an admirable ensemble.

After intermission, two pieces from 1995 by the Israeli composer Betty Olivero brought Joseph Crnko’s Northwest Boychoir to the stage, where they coped splendidly with the Yiddish texts of Shtiler, Shtiler and Mode’Ani’. Baritone Erich Parce, harpist Valerie Muzzolini, and clarinetist Laura DeLuca added skilled contributions to the latter piece, and the busy Ms. DeLuca also provided the rare pleasure of hearing a basset horn in Shtiler, Shtiler, which I found the stronger piece of the two.

The newest work on the program, at least in the version we heard it in, was an arrangement for string quintet, oboe, and voices (commissioned by Music of Remembrance) of Pictures from the Private Collection of God, by the Canadian-born Israeli Aharon Harlap. A setting of five poems by the Hungarian Holocaust survivor Yaakov Barzilai, heavily freighted with pain and with an occasional touch of bitter irony, it was well sung by mezzo-soprano Angela Niederloh and baritone Parce, and equally skillfully accompanied by oboist Ben Hausmann, violinists Schmidt and Elisa Barston, violist Schachter, cellist Walter Gray, and bassist Jonathan Green. Kurt Beattie introduced each of the five songs with a beautiful reading of Riva Rubin’s English translation of the Hebrew originals, and the total result was certainly moving, though I felt - as I did with Lior Navok’s Before the Ark a year or two ago - that the spoken interjections tended to diminish that effect.

Altogether, though I don’t always responded positively to the specific new works programmed by MoR, the policy of expanding the Holocaust-related repertoire, rather than confining activities to works from the Nazi years, is surely the right one.

When, by the way, are Seattle audiences going to be given the chance of hearing my late friend Wilfred Josephs’s Requiem? A substantial setting of the Kaddish, explicitly composed in tribute to the victims of the Holocaust, it won the First International Composing Competition of the City of Milan and La Scala in 1963, and no less distinguished a conductor than Carlo Maria Giulini, who led the Chicago premiere nine years later, described it as “the most important work by a living composer.” Performing it would be an eminently suitable gesture in Gerard Schwarz’s final season as music director of the Seattle Symphony.

The two older works on the program were Cosmic Spring, by Edwin Geist, and The Wind, by the much more eminent Franz Schreker (1878-1934). Given the sufferings the half-Jewish German Geist endured before he was murdered in the Kovno ghetto in 1942 at the age of 40, as well as the touching note his niece, Rosian Zerner, contributed to the program book, to say that I found his ten-minute piano trio - or which the versatile Ms. Miller joined violinist Keylin and cellist Finkelstein - disappointing inevitably produces that feeling-like-a-heel effect. The piece began with promising thematic ideas, mostly in the shape of fragmentary rising scales, and I looked forward to hearing them developed. But “composition” means “putting together,” and that is an activity at which Geist seemed not very adept: instead of moving convincingly from one musical point to another, he resorted to merely stopping when one thought was exhausted and starting again with the unconnected next one.

For Schreker’s 1909 quintet The Wind, inspired by a poem with the same title by ballerina Grete Wiesenthal - any relation of Simon, I wonder? - MoR had commissioned choreography from Donald Byrd, artistic director of Seattle’s Spectrum Dance Theater. Since I have had hard things to say about Byrd in the context of his contributions to a couple of Seattle Opera productions (Giulio Cesare and Aida), I was particularly pleased this time to find his choreography, as interpreted by dancers Geneva Jenkins, Patrick Pulkrabek, and Marissa Quimby, both visually graceful and dramatically apt. Combined with compellingly fiery playing by Schmidt, DeLuca, Gray, hornist Jeffrey Fair, and pianist Craig Sheppard, it materially reinforced the impact of an already impressive work.

^{Back to Top                                                    Cumulative Index Page}